BlueTooth Low Energy (aka BLE) is a low energy variant of the BlueTooth short range wireless standard that was introduced as part of the BlueTooth 4.0 specification. Further details about BLE and the Bluetooth 4.0 specification may be found at https://www.bluetooth.org/en-us/specification/adopted-specifications and https://developer.bluetooth.org/TechnologyOverview/Pages/BLE.aspx which are incorporated herein by reference. The purpose of BLE is to provide an extremely low power wireless system similar in power consumption to Zigbee. Zigbee is an older wireless low power communication standard.
Shortly after the introduction of BLE chipsets, Apple® introduced a product called iBeacon along with a simple protocol specification, all based on BLE. Further details of the iBeacon product and its protocol specification may be found at https://developer.apple.com/ibeacon/ which is incorporated herein by reference. iBeacon provides a BLE beacon (transmit only) that devices (e.g. cell phones) may receive and use to determine a rough location. The location technology is simple proximity based on the RSSI (received signal strength indication) of the beacon as seen by the receiving device.
Due to the significant impact of a complex indoor environment to the radio frequency (RF) signal propagation path such as obstruction, multiple-path, fading etc., the received signal strength (RSSI) is highly volatile and only loosely correlated to the distance between the transmitter and the receiver. Therefore, the location technology must create methods to detect and minimize the noises, and combine with additional information to intelligently determine the location of an object in the complex indoor environment.
The usage of the BLE system can vary from simple Way Finding application to more complicated enterprise wide asset tracking, to tracking critical patient/staff workflow process. Each of these applications could have different BLE deployment scheme and combination of the schemes. In addition, depending on the applications, the ideal location engine processing needs to be on an end device such as a smartphone or a tag, or can be on a cauterized place such as an appliance or in the cloud. The architecture flexible and variety require the location technology to be dynamic and flexible enough to accommodate all the usage scenarios.